


Theater

by etherati



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alternate Ending, Cecil is Human, Gen, Injury, Typical Night Vale Weirdness, Worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Knowing which horribly traumatic experiences are genuine and which are not is an art, not a science. Detecting the moment when priorities shift is even harder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Theater

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Ep 29 "Subway". Also a bunch of the older ones but, eh. CATCH UP!

*

The first time Carlos feels sympathetic terror for the disembodied voice on the radio, there’s nothing he can do about it. And he doesn’t even know the guy, not really? But he’s got a gut level intuition—and just enough time in Night Vale under his belt to know to trust it—that under the vaguely sarcastic obsequiousness, Cecil Baldwin has a subversive streak as wide as… well, not all that wide, actually. But given how subversive physics and reason and  _reality_ are in this place, he’ll take whatever help he can get.

So he’s working on a letter to management—he’s got a gel running anyway, on the fragmented winged toad DNA he’d collected the day before, and that can take a while so he’s got some time to kill—figuring that the contract issue is something that’ll take a week or so to resolve. The urgency is theater, is drama for the sake of drama. And he’s still fiddling with the final draft, removing excessive semicolons and wracking his brain for proper business letter formatting, when the situation at the station so suddenly spirals all the fuck out of control.

 _I’m going to try to make a break for the door,_  the voice whispers, and a part of Carlos—attentive, fingers frozen on the keyboard—wants to tell him no, don’t run, let them pass by, you’ll only grab their attention. That’s what they’d told him about cougars and bears, anyway, before he’d moved to the southwest. Terrifying Predators 101!

Another part, a part that is well familiar with the darkness and the stale particle-board-and-shoestink smell of that little hollow under a desk, the one that never seems big enough until you fold yourself up just so—that part says, _Run._

But in the end, nothing he wants to say matters; radio only works in one direction.

He saves the letter to his desktop, one more miscellaneous file amid dozens, slaps the laptop closed. Takes a breath, and reminds himself: people drop like flies around here. Don’t get attached.

*

And yet, against all odds, Cecil lives to terrify his listeners another day. Drama, Carlos thinks again, sure now that he’d just been sucked in by the theatrics, until he sees the man out in public a few days later, walking with a wincing limp and a look on his face like someone trying to breathe through mildly inverted lungs.

Carlos doesn’t turn the laboratory radio off ever again, after that.

*

The second time it happens, Carlos has just sent a good portion of his team over to the studio to warn them about the… bread snakes? That’s about as far as the hypothesis had gotten before casualty reports had started coming in rapidfire, and an incomplete warning would serve the community better than no warning at all.

He uses his team’s involvement to justify his sudden, miserable worry when the broadcast inevitably falls apart. Because his people are there, and Cecil had said  _air,_  had said something about ‘gooey stuff inside’, and if the entire studio has suddenly lost all breathable air or  _depressurized_  or something horrific like that—

Those deaths would be on his head. Because he should have gone with the warning himself,  _would have_  if he hadn’t been a huge baby who couldn’t handle a flirtatious admirer.

The picture of that in his head, though—just him and Cecil and probably a station intern, which he wouldn’t be able to do anything about, all lying asphyxiated on the floor of the sound booth, dead eyes pale like the cool white bellies of the snakes—does not make him feel any better. It’s almost worse, but still he tells himself: he’s worried for his team. His team.

*

Then the broadcast comes back, and Cecil’s  _fine_ , thank goodness, and oh, apparently the scientists are all still alive too, waving and shouting about the serpents.

Carlos turns the volume dial down—just down, not off—and rests his head in his hands. A tension headache is building, and it has a name stamped on it, and its name is  _oh dear god I’m in trouble._

*

He arrives to the studio too late or too early, depending on how he looks at it. There’s sand everywhere—in his hair, in his pockets and all the seams of his clothes, under his fingernails and between his teeth. It grits under the soles of his shoes as he makes for the broadcast booth, gasping out his held breath, stumbling a little towards the glass window.

He catches himself, looks up. His eyes meet another pair through the pane, just burning black pits in what should be Cecil’s face.

This time, he hadn’t even bothered to turn the radio down before he’d covered his face with his sleeve, braced himself, and run out into the street toward the studio. The phenomenon Cecil had described, appearing suddenly in the wall of his booth, had sounded scientifically fascinating! He tells himself this, and ignores the clench in his chest at the thought of how Cecil’s voice had faded off into nothing, hollowing out, receding. It’s a flimsy excuse.

For whatever it’s worth, the portal is still there, just as Cecil had described it on the radio, pulsing darkness like the smokey mouth of some massive, devouring beast. The man standing before it hesitates, smiles a smile that isn’t, raising an eyebrow at Carlos.

It’s Cecil and it isn’t, and the push-pull is unbearable. Carlos steels his expression, hardens it. Tries to look more dangerous than he is.

It isn’t working, and the not-Cecil takes one swaggering step back away from the portal toward him—

—and then a heavy metal stapler tumbles end over end through the air and nails the imposter square in the shoulder. He grimaces, sighs dramatically, and then retreats through the pulsing black haze before Carlos even has the chance to give a grinning Dana a thumbs-up.

On the soundboard, a red light blinks furiously. The weather is winding down.

*

The real Cecil returns moments later, of course, stumbling out of the miasma like a drunken man trying to step off of a boat. The first thing he notices is the blinking light, dashing to the board to scoop his headset back up. The second thing he notices is Carlos, across the board and behind a layer of glass, and all he can spare is a short nod,  _yes, I’m all right_ , before launching into the wrap-up and sign-off.

And as he blathers on about blood and graffiti and healing, gesticulating to no one with hands covered in defensive cuts and scratches, all Carlos can see is the ring of dark bruises already blooming all around his throat.

Carlos swallows, mouth dry, black heat of vertigo clawing at the back of his skull.

*

“I’m working hard every day, trying to die!” the radio shouts, and Carlos pulls the radio plug from the wall, drops the entire thing into the trash can.

*

Later that night, he fishes it out again. He doesn’t really sleep, anymore.

*

“For god’s sake, Cecil, you saw what was happening to them! How could you just…” Carlos has got his hands planted on the desk, leaning forward over the board, so when he drops his head in a groaning sigh, his forehead nearly upsets the entire sound balance. There’s probably a punishment for that, probably a bad one. He wants to laugh and scream all at once.

“Carlos—”

“What would make you think for a  _second_  that it was a good idea to go jump into a, uh, a god-damned westbound total perspective vortex?”

“Carlos—”

“What did you think was going to happen, it would tell you what a great and important guy you are, because the universe exists just for you?”

Cecil rests his head in one hand, gazes across the board dreamily. “Ah, the existential question. It has occurred to me.”

“Oh for fuck’s… okay, let me see,” Carlos says, reaching across to take Cecil’s dumb stupid face in his hands, turn it toward the light. It’s impossible to tell what his pupils are doing, with the creepy white-out contacts he’s always wearing, but he seems a little clammy? Maybe? “I’ll need to get a blood sample,” he says, “Run it through the PCR, see if you’re showing any of the same DNA degradation that—”

“ _Carlos,_ ” Cecil finally says, a little distorted through the scientist’s grip on his face. “I didn’t actually get on the train.”

Silence, for a long moment.

“What?” Carlos asks. His hands drop away. “What.”

“It was  _obviously_  destroying people,” Cecil says, with the tone of  _duh, didn’t you get the memo?_  “And you know how  _incredibly illegal_  it would be for me to contradict Council opinion on-air and tell people not to ride it?”

“…okay.”

“But  _clearly_  I had to stop people from riding! It was my civic duty! So I said I was going in, sat through the weather, and made up some nonsense that would scare the average citizen away from its DNA-mutilating grasp.”

He looks incredibly pleased with himself. He looks very punchable. Carlos switches gears. “Aren’t you concerned about, uh…” he gestures in a circle at the ceiling.

“Ah, no. Surveillance immunity.”

“How many stamps do you need for that one?”

“A  _lot_. Thankfully, Steve Carlsburg keeps me supplied with opportunities.”

Another stretch of quiet. Carlos moistens his lips carefully.

“I thought you were a reporter,” he says.

Cecil lets out a long breath. It sounds a little painful. “I am. And trust me, the temptation was there. A whole new realm of sense and experience? A chance to find out what it’s like to be eaten and advertised at by cockroaches all at the same time? Which, as an aside, is probably what was really happening to those people. But.”

“But?”

Cecil just looks at him for a long moment, intent, with his ridiculous dye-job and and his grandfathery zippered sweater and the crooked third eye he draws on with a marker before every broadcast like a talisman, and Carlos remembers telling himself,  _don’t get attached._

He wonders how he ever thought he had a chance.

Then Cecil ducks down, slides a drawer open on rattling runners. Comes up with a bar of chromed plastic and fake marble balanced horizontally between his index fingers. It’s a trophy, a cheap dinky little one like you could get in large quantities to hand out to little league all-stars and seven-year-old orange-belts. Carlos has never seen it before, but there’s a sinking in his gut that tells him he knows what it is anyway.

“It’s a trophy,” he says, intelligently. The figure on top appears to be figure skating. It’s apt, Carlos thinks; he’s spent the last year and change on exceptionally thin ice.

“I was going to give this to you a month ago. For surviving here for a whole year. But you were busy, you know? Doing science! And averting a war! And, you know, dying in a bowling alley.”

Carlos chews his lip; embarrassment flares, and he’s not sure why because it’s not like there’s any shame in  _bleeding_. Everyone does it. But still. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I know.” Cecil deftly rolls it upright onto one palm, offering it out. “It’s still yours, if you want it.”

It’s heavy in his hand when he takes it, heavier than it should be; it’s probably hollow, filled with something horrific and—  _okay, let’s not go there_. There’s a reflective little plaque on the base, but he can’t make out what it used to say because it’s been scrawled over, in the same highly illegal Sharpie that Cecil uses on his face, with the words DON’T EVER DIE AGAIN.

“Subtle,” Carlos says.

“Not much in Night Vale is subtle. You might have noticed.”

“I was really worried,” Carlos blurts out, and these are old words; he has been worried for a  _year_. “That they’d gotten to you, changed you. That you’d really been riding around on that thing for years.”

Cecil chuckles, stashes the headphones; dials the board down for the night, and all the flickering LEDs die down to black. Shadows shift around with the changing lighting, creating illusions of things that aren’t there.

“ _Theater,_ ” Cecil says, and if Carlos didn’t know better, he’d swear he saw the extra eye wink—and then it’s just ink on skin and nothing more.

*


End file.
